Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Jumper Review

Although this movie had great potential, it is all pretty silly and even somewhat confusing. It concerns a boy who discovers his ability to travel through time portals.



Later, after all of this jumping around, another group is out to get these "jumpers". It's not really satisfactorily explained why.



The overall exercise seemed to be to do a lot of on location shooting. It's not boring, however, just kinda stupid.



Hayden Christensen (Darth Vader) still can't act and Samuel L. Jackson does his best with more subpar material.



Brainless, mindless, fun, but don't expect much more.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Pogen Cookies and Frank Zappa

One of the best Frank Zappa songs is this one called "Florentine Pogen". For fun, I decided to do a search on the Internet to see if anyone knew what a "Florentine Pogen" was. I do, but I just wanted to see what others said.



Amazingly, little is known about these Swedish cookies. and most people hadn't even heard of them. I was living in Southern California in the early 70s as was Zappa. His song debuted in 1974. It has nothing really to do with the cookie, other than the name, but Frank must have been eating them just the same. The Florentine ones were probably the best ones they made.



Apparently, the Pogen Cookie Company is really spelled Pagen in Sweden, but people in the US would probably pronounce it pay-gen, so that's why the change to Pogen.



Nobody seems to remember the many varieties of Pogens. I still have a brochure about the cookies and besides Florentine Pogens, there was Oatmeal Pogens, Toffee Pogens, Sprits Pogens, Walnut Pogens, Raspberry Pogens, Sugar Pogens, Ginger Snap Pogens, Pogens Pistachio, Apricot Pogens, Chocolate Chip Pogens, Coco-Mint Pogens, Half Moon Pogens and Space Pogens.



I remember trying them all as a kid, and remember that most if not all of them were pretty good. I never quite understood why they called the pistachio Pogens Pogens Pistachio, but oh well.



So now you know...